[private] you can't hold back time

[Nashua]

For a moment, Nashua just stares at Cheri.

There had been hope that Leilan was right. He couldn't help; he was a son of the flame-marked Guardian and they all seemed to dream in the face of adversity. If his mother was truly alive, it might abate some of the grief that Nash harbored over Yanhua and his disappearance. That hope even manages to flicker in his copper breast, a small flame that the former son of Taiga immediately quashes because he recognizes it for the selfish want it is.

He remembers sneaking down to the Taigan shore one night, listening over the quiet lull of ocean waves as his mother slowly revealed all the ways that the Curse had torn her apart to her beloved cousin, Elena. And then he remembers all the quiet ways she had tried to put herself back together over the years, hiding her pain and grief behind a patient smile as she mothered and listened and lead.

To know about Gale would have shattered her.

Then he remembers that these moments are too rare and too precious to spend worrying as he does. These are worries for when they are back on the ground and his niece has returned to her home in Loess.

But there is no helping the smile that he gives as she exclaims over the nickname - Sprite. It suits her, he thinks. It always has, with her glowing and the way that she shimmered in the sun. With Cheri, there was no one place to look and not be stunned by her ethereal beauty. She was radiant from all angles and while the title he gives her is far more suited to the youth that crafted stories about courts in the clouds, it still seems to suit her.

Nash - the nag, he thinks with a wry grin - watches as she leaps into the air and immediately takes off. The breeze that she summons serves as a reminder that their forefathers had once been weavers of it, and that swelling pride follows the Freyr as he takes off. His wings widen and his ascent isn't as fast nor as impressive as Cheri, but Nashua reveals a grace and a keen knowledge about the drafts and currents of the winds on the Isle. He uses them to his advantage, moving up with them and with a sense of ease.

"Not bad," he tells as they both hover above with the Isle and sea glistening below them, with Beqanna looming on the faint horizon and gives Cheri a rather conspiratorial smile. Feeling the wind beneath his wings, Nashua draws both of his speckled wings against his chestnut sides and snakes his neck downward. He nosedives for the gray sea, and holds them tight against him until the last moment. One wing flares out broadly, twisting half his bulk upward towards Cheri while the other opens a moment later and cuts through a bitterly cold ocean wave when it reaches its full length.

Regaining his balance, Nashua flaps his wings and rejoins the young Loessian queen, greeting her with a smirk.

It lasts only a moment, before his smile falters and Nash turns his green eyes towards the mainland. Why had Mazikeen gone along with Gale? The striped stallion shares with the other pegasus what he initially thought: "When Noel and I went to Hyaline," he starts and then stops, only because it is still hard to speak so openly of something that had been kept tightly shut for so long. But that had been the problem, he reminded himself. If Bolder and his other children had known about the Curse, this never would have happened. "She seemed... twisted." Clearly not the same mare that they both remembered from the Midsummer Festival.

Sighing, he goes on to say, "They were expecting twins. Or so Gale told me. I only caught the scent of one other child in Hyaline besides Bolder. Perhaps it has the other hidden away somewhere, to use as some kind of leverage against her." Nashua felt it again, that old anger and fury attached to the Curse's previous host. His jaw clenches and though he tries to quell it, his expression turns dark. "This is what it does, Cheri." She hadn't encountered Gale yet, and he would do his best to prevent it so that she wouldn't. "It twists and it warps. Anything that comes across its path, it will attempt to ruin."

Her Accord - this gathering of the North and South - was their best chance of preventing it and other evils from spreading. But Nashua knew (and had learned) that even with the best of intentions, the worst was still possible to happen and he wanted his niece as prepared as she could be, if that day ever (unfortunately) came.

@Cheri